1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the invention relates to the field of multimedia, and more specifically, to multimedia content delivery.
2. Description of Related Art
Multi-media content delivery systems need to address a large set of challenges to provide a high quality multimedia experience to the end user. A typical multimedia system may be unicast or multicast. In a unicast system, a client or customer is interested in receiving a particular video clip or movie from a media content server. In a multicast system, the media content server sends the multimedia content to a large number of clients.
There are several problems in the existing media content delivery systems. First, there may be losses in transmission resulting in dropped packets or significant delay. When this occurs, the system may freeze until the lost packet arrives at the client. In most cases, a start-up delay may occur causing interrupted viewing. Second, streaming media content over commodity network such as the Internet usually has very slow start-up time. The user has to wait for many seconds before the media can begin playing. Third, video quality may be degraded due to errors in decoding or transmission. Fourth, in multicast systems, the user does not have the flexibility to select an appropriate level of error recovery capability according to his or her requirements.